Structure
your medical practice business
to adjust
to the continuing and future
changes.

Anna Wilde Mathews, a WSJ
journalist, may not have the
answers to the future of U.S.
Health Care, but competently
points out in her article in
the December 12,
2011 issue of the
WSJ the current thinking among
the healthcare planners. If
you plan to remain in your
private medical practice that
you own or plan to own, you
absolutely should be planning
your alternatives right now.

Are you simply going to sit
back and watch the vulture’s
picnic? The unsettled dust
storm of future healthcare
management, by all indications
presently, is sending a clear
message to private physicians.
Either be the compliant victim
of the upcoming new healthcare
system trend of merging
everything, or make the
difficult decision
to
remain
in control of your own medical
practice, how you practice,
and
where
you practice.

Don’t ever let yourself fall
into the “victim” mode. You
have a good number of
medical practice business
management alternatives
available to you that you
may not have
ever considered
seriously
(coming
article).

The forces that are blinding
the minds of the healthcare
planners are those that
compete with the traditional
format of medical practice and
healthcare
management
we have
always been so comfortable
with. No matter what system
we
evolve into, personal
independence to practice as we
want and make medical
judgments based on our
knowledge, skills, and
experience can never be taken
away from us.

Some forces that always
prevent quality healthcare

1. Cost of providing
healthcare varies directly
with the quality
of healthcare…

Evidence that forcing
professional healthcare
providers to cut costs that
consequently reduces the
quality of healthcare is
abundant. The British
healthcare system is a good
example.

Not only do they
continue to lose their good
physicians to other areas of
the world, but also continue
to see a steady transition
back to private
practice for
the same reasons that
physicians and other
professional
healthcare
providers in our country are
frustrated to the point of
quitting practice. The more
doctors
are pushed to reduce
cost, the poorer the
health
care will be.

When medical practice income is restricted by any means
because of the
larger issue of
affordable healthcare for
everyone, it’s clear that
students
likely will select a
different profession, unless
they have a robotic
personality and love
being
told what to practice, how to
practice, where to practice,
and if they can practice.
Doctors already in medical
practice today
are being
forced to increase their
patient load, sometimes
unethically, to financially
survive.

All doctors will
reach a burnout phase sooner
or later. Marketing their
medical practices will reduce
the possibility of that
considerably. The more
the
doctor's incomes drop the more
doctors will leave medical
practice.
College students
won't pick a career that
results in debt and poverty.

3. Medical provider mergers
vs. private medical
practice…

Healthcare planners are bullied by political, economic, and
human rights
issues. Building
large systems by mergers or
cooperation, from hospitals to
medical offices and private
medical practices, always
leads to the same end. For
doctors it’s loss of
independent medical judgment,
income control,
personal
choices for medical care of
patients, and one’s motivation
to
improve medical skills
and
knowledge.

For hospitals it’s a thundering conflict of methods and
elements of medical
care being
provided or not. Hospitals
merging with doctors and their
medical
practices brings on
financial and practice control
headaches.
Applying this
approach has helped some
hospitals to survive
financially,
but huge numbers
of smaller hospitals have
closed their doors as a result
of no mergers.

4. Professional satisfaction vs. dictatorial medicine…

Are you a doctor that derives professional satisfaction
from independent
private
medical practice, or
a doctor
whose satisfaction comes with
a focus
on time off, fixed
schedules, employee status,
and acceptable limitations
on
your skills and medical
knowledge? The new generation
of doctors
trend towards the
latter.

I’ve
purposely inserted these
common issues here to give you
a running start for
considerations for what you
will soon need to make
decisions about... your style
of
practice, what gives you the
highest potential to fulfill
your goals and dreams
for your
medical practice business.

Ideas about what to
concentrate on in your medical
practice business
plans and
goals for the immediate future...

Whatever decisions you make
about what you’re willing to
do or not do in your
medical
professional career, the most
important thing to keep in
mind is to
prepare your
present medical practice to be
adaptable to any healthcare
system established
in the
future. Here are a few ideas...

1. Focus your practice on a
medical care niche you especially like.You’ve no doubt recognized the
trends towards increasing
numbers of
medical
subspecialties... niches. You
probably also agree that a
medical student or doctor
can’t possibly learn all they
should know about medicine,
which is manifested by the
increasing subspecialties in
medicine.

Within your medical practice
you have areas of medical care
that you love to do and you’re
very good at doing for your
patients. Rather than becoming
a "commodity practitioner"
where there are hundreds of
doctors doing the
same thing
you are, you are obliged to
create a position for yourself
above the others, at least for
any successful financial
outcome for your practice.
You
do that by being the best at
one or two elements of
your
practice business.

From a marketing
strategy and
successful business
standpoint, you will do
far
better in your career by
narrowing down your expertise
to what you do best. You’ll
earn much more money, be
recognized for being the best
in
those areas among patients,
and put yourself in much
greater demand when and if you
are forced into collaborating
with the medical system that’s
coming.

2. Make decisions about
what you will do... now... not later
when all hell is
breaking
loose.

If you haven’t already
formulated in your mind what
you can and will do,
this is a
good time, before the 2012
elections and after when the
healthcare legislation again
reaches a fever pitch. Take
time to read everything you
can about what the healthcare
planners are saying and
thinking, because you
will end
up in their pockets… you need
to know which pocket you
prefer
be in long before the
final choice has to be made.

Decisions you are making here
concern you personally. For
example, if you have already
worked as an employee inside
an HMO, like Kaiser
Permanente, then you may have
made a decision you liked
it… or just couldn’t continue
to practice under their
supervision. In that case the
decision has already
been
made. Now, after deciding one
way or the other, the next
step is to settle on a
pre-planned path of
positioning yourself and your
practice for
the most
advantages possible.

If you are happy inside a
healthcare managed system,
work yourself up to
the chief
of the department, or some
higher administrative position
where
the salaries are higher
and your time is more
adjustable. At that point, you
will be able to transfer to
another managed care system
for
even greater advantages.

If you are fitted to be your
own boss, then it’s time to
stop doing the parts
of your
medical practice you dislike
and spend more time on what
you do
like. Remember, you
don’t have to practice
everything you learned, just
the things you really find
exciting and fulfilling.
Practicing everything you were
taught is neither smart nor
efficient. When your patients
see what
you love to do, the
word spreads. Referrals
increase. Practice income
hits
a high.

3. The importance of
timing

As of
today, you have very
little time left to position
yourself for
the top spots.
It’s time enough to create the
adjustments in your practice
that can open doors in any
direction when it becomes
necessary. You can move to an
area of the country you find
more attractive to practice in
so
as to be fully established when
the medical tsunami hits.

When you read the medical
practice stats, about 14% of
physicians that
move their
practice sites each year in
the USA, it reminds you that
many doctors settle in spots
they learn was a mistake, or
are dissatisfied with
the area
for some reason that shows up
later on (like practice competition, lack of adequate
consultants, hospital
facilities inadequate for what
you
want to be doing
in
practice).

Are you one of those doctors?
Do it now… you’ll never find
a better time
to move if
your
circumstances permit.

Another more
practical issue
where timing is critical is
that of improving
your
knowledge and skills to a new
level… planned to do, never
did. If you are a primary care
doctor, take some office
surgery courses and do your
own biopsies and laceration
repairs instead of referring
to dermatologists
or surgeons.

If you are a surgeon, learn
new surgical procedures and
skills that are not available
in your peer community. Make
yourself different from other
practices. There will be large
numbers of doctors trying to
position
themselves at the
last minute before the tsunami
hits as you can imagine. Treat
yourself well now and it will
pay off whatever happens in
healthcare.4. Rather than solo... go
group.

It’s
better not to waste time
reinventing the wheel. Use
what already works and modify
it to meet your needs. Can you
imagine how many solo doctors
are going to be tramping over
each other to join a private
practice group when or
if the
new healthcare system is
structured so as to obliterate
solo
medical practice?

One obvious
reason this is a
profoundly good choice for
solo physicians in private
medical practice, whether the
system is changed or not, is
the overhead savings when in a
group practice. Better to do
it now and not when every
doctor is trying to find a
group position.

It’s almost impossible today
to begin a new medical
practice coming out of med
school or residency because of
the horrific educational debt
hanging over new doctors. Can
you imagine going to a banker
to request a new loan to open
a practice when you are
indebted for $150,000 or so
and unemployed?

Medical
groups, mixed or
single specialty, offer
advantages that combine your
relative independence of
medical practice and sharing
the costs of overhead. Both
factors are essential to
remaining financially solvent
and profitable. Many medical
practice business experts feel
that private solo practice is
a lost cause for future
planning. They may
be right.

5. Time to
create a
non-professional
additional business
income

It doesn’t take a genius
to recognize that the
continual drop in medical
practice incomes over the last
ten years or so will continue.
Any college student thinking
about going to medical school
today probably understands the
debt harness they will have at
the time they graduate from
medical school... maybe not.

Additionally, those of us
doctors who are now at
retirement age understand that
it would have been a good
decision (had we known the
future) to have developed a
separate multiple stream
income business to help meet
our family obligations most
doctors can’t meet today... like
funding a retirement plan and
paying for kid’s college
education. Any person
considering a career in
medicine should already be
creating such a second income
business.

Fact:Physicians and other
healthcare doctors will never
(rare exceptions) reach an
income level commensurate with
their educational level, time
and money spent in education
and training,
or hard-earned
professional lifestyle,
without
a sound
business education.

Doctors never sign an
agreement to be relegated to
the lower middle class in our
society, meaning being poor.

All of the personal
gratification, fulfillment,
joy, self-esteem, and
aggrandizement resulting from
years of medical care of
patients doesn’t compensate
for having to compromise our
family obligations, not being
able to reach our personal
dreams and goals, and having
our full potential
trashed,
all because of lack of
financial resources. And we
all know what causes that… and
it’s not from lack of hard
work, motivation, or passion.

Get started now in your
additional business… it’s not
as hard as you think.

6. Employ a family
member as a
marketing manager?

Literally every medical
practice needs a special
person hired to do the
marketing for the medical
business. Not only will it add
a second income to the family,
but also will be a person you
can easily keep tabs on to
insure
the job is done right.
And, they will work overtime
without
compensation... maybe!

I must point out
that employing
family members can
have very
deleterious
consequences. Having
a spouse with a
suspicious
personality about
what is happening
around the office
can be fatal, or
worse. My daughter
worked in my office
to help out for a
summer job while in
high school. Everything
was reported back to
her mother,
including what's
being said, her
perceptions of
events, and office
business troubles.
Not Good!!

If not a family member, then
hire someone with marketing
knowledge from the local
college or marketing agencies.
Don’t hire a patient of yours.

Comment

I’ve covered
only a few of the
ideas and marketing strategies
here for lack of space.
Keeping a focus on the
downward trends associated
with professional medical
practitioners and the medical
profession in general, is my
way of finding ways to help
you avoid them... not simply to
help you get out of them.

Article #28A

DECEMBER ARTICLE---DAN
KENNEDY

"Gratitude As A
Marketing Strategy"

Many years ago, I took over a
business with mammoth
collection problems:
almost all of its customers had open
accounts and paid their bills
ten to sixty days
late (except
those who didn't pay at all).
We quickly instituted a number
of
corrective measures,
including tighter credit
controls and policies,
interests
charges, a sequence
of past-due notices, and
collection calls.

However, we
also instituted a positive
strategy. We started sending
hand-signed thank you notes
for prompt payment to anybody
who did pay on time... those
who were almost on time... and
even late payers who responded
to a past-due notice. Guess
what happened? Those customers
who received thank you notes
became
better paying
customers.

I know a Doctor who started a
procedure of giving fresh,
long-stemmed red roses
to his
women patients who showed up
for their appointment on time,
or paid their bills on time,
or referred another patient.
"Funny thing," he told me. "We
no longer have patients
missing appointments. Our
collections have improved.
Referrals are
up. And, some
guys are asking how they can
get roses, too!

Here are a few specific ideas
you might adopt, as ways of
saying
thank you...

Keep customers'
birthdays on file
and send cards
and/or mail gifts

Send Thanksgiving
cards or letters. Make it a habit to
drop a personal
thank-you note in
the mail each day,
to at least one
customer

Send a gift
certificate or
discount certificate
to a customer who
makes an unusually
large purchase

I figured it up just the other
day; last year, personally and
for my various
businesses
combined, I signed checks for
well over one million dollars,
in
payment for goods and
services to all sorts of
people and companies. And I
don't care what anybody says -
a million bucks is a lot of
money. Yet, I can
count on the
fingers of one hand the number
of the recipients of all that
money
who have expressed any
gratitude in any formal kind
of way. Only one of them
found
out and recognized my
birthday.

Just saying "thanks" is a big
step ahead of the competition
today.

DAN S. KENNEDYis
a serial, multi-millionaire
entrepreneur; highly paid and
sought after marketing and
business strategist; advisor
to countless first-generation,
from-scratch multi-millionaire
and 7-figure income
entrepreneurs and
professionals; and, in his
personal practice, one of the
very highest paid
direct-response copywriters in
America. As a speaker, he has
delivered over 2,000
compensated presentations,
appearing repeatedly on
programs with the likes of
Donald Trump, Gene Simmons
(KISS), Debbi Fields (Mrs.
Fields Cookies), and many
other celebrity-entrepreneurs,
for former U.S. Presidents and
other world leaders, and other
leading business speakers like
Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy and
Tom Hopkins, often addressing
audiences of 1,000 to 10,000
and up. His popular books
have been favorably recognized
by Forbes, Business Week, Inc.
and Entrepreneur Magazine. His
NO B.S. MARKETING LETTER, one
of the business newsletters
published for Members of
Glazer-Kennedy Insider's
Circle, is the largest paid
subscription newsletter in its
genre in the world.